“You remembered.”
A small laugh with nothing behind it. “I remembered every birthday.”
Then it went.
“Roz. I need you to know something before I go.”
“What?”
“I’d already bought the ring.”
I could not make a sound.
“What ring?”
“The one I was going to give you before I went. That summer.”
And I said, “Then why did you marry somebody else?” — which is a question I had not let myself ask out loud in thirty-nine years.
And that man started crying down a telephone.
“That’s what I’ve spent forty years wanting to explain.”
Then, very quietly: “Come to St. Ide’s. There’s something here you need to see. Once you’ve seen it you’ll understand why I stopped.”
Forty minutes later I pushed that door open.
He was in the bed. Thinner than the boy, and completely, unmistakably him.
But it was not Gil that made the noise come out of me.
